Never and Again

Summary

Never and Again combines the subversive critique of fascism in Starship Troopers, the irreverent tone and horror of Gideon the Ninth, and the hard-hitting fictional war memoir format of The Things They Carried.

In an all too imaginable future, where the privileged lead lives untouched by wars that have become a global pastime, disenfranchised young people who “volunteer” to become super soldiers are injected with nanotechnology that repeatedly brings them back from death.

In a race against time, one such soldier and an analyst struggle to understand strange phenomena that occur after too many resurrections: glitches known as nostalgia, which even in the midst of combat can hurtle a soldier into the past.

But after eight, nine, even ten resurrections lies something much worse than just glitches …

Intense, visceral, and disturbingly plausible, Never and Again explores America’s addiction to war, the myth of meritocracy, and the ethics of technology, all feeding into the ultimate question of what makes us human.

Never and Again is inspired by Justina’s own experiences in the military, starting as a Non-Commissioned Officer in the Army and then to a commissioned Signal Officer in the Pennsylvania National Guard deployed to Kosovo.

Ultimately, Justina’s frustration with the military bureaucracy and her inability to improve conditions for her unit led her to resign her commission and become a civilian employee. Eventually she decided to make the jump to full-time writing.

Never and Again is Justina’s love letter to her time on active duty, in all its messy glory, and also a way to pull back the curtain on the inhumanity of the military industrial complex. It isn’t an easy read, nor should it be.

Justina is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous critically acclaimed books, including Dread Nation, the award-winning middle-grade Ophie’s Ghosts, a number of New York Times bestselling Star Wars books and one of the five story architects of the LucasFilm blockbuster expansion of the Star Wars universe: The High Republic.